The Great Debate

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Shareholder activism sounds so respectable, even noble. The phrase conjures images of good-corporate-governance folk fighting greedy or dysfunctional management in the company’s best interest. While shareholders can be disciplinarians who right the wrongs of abusive directors, many boardroom activists advance some of the most destructive short-term thinking in business today.

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Apple and Samsung, you might have heard, have spent the last many months in a California courtroom haggling over who violated whose patents. At the end of August, Apple was awarded more than a billion dollars in damages by a jury, and the Samsung is now claiming jury misconduct. Just last week a U.S. appeals court threw out the judge’s ban on Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus phone. The whole situation is, really, turning into a bit of a confusing mess.

from Paul Smalera:

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Is it possible in the year of our Lord 2012 that leadership still isn't well understood? In 2012, despite business journalism’s fetishization of Steve Jobs, the most successful leader ever, whose apotheosis was Walter Isaacson’s doorstop, Steve Jobs, a biography of the half-Syrian, bearded man who built the world’s most valuable company, brick by brick, and found himself, like an earlier CEO of sorts, with legions of devoted apostles, some powerful enemies, and an inextinguishable legend? Is it possible, despite the endless streams of management self-help articles burbling out of Fast Company, Inc., Harvard Business Review, Businessweek, Fortune and the blogs of droves of self-appointed leadership gurus, we need more advice? And is it possible despite the emails – so many emails, Jesus wept – those emails that aggregate all this content using algorithms and intern labor, and slice it up so that the middle manager in Minnesota and the lawyer in Los Angeles and the new media marketer in New York are all .0058% more likely to click through to a relevant article? Is it possible, really possible, the answer to our prayers is another book on leadership?

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Last night at Georgetown University, I stood up and applauded Mike Daisey after he was done speaking about why he lied. As a journalist, you are not supposed to stand up and applaud the people you’re covering, especially people who just admitted to lying about key details about workers they had (or hadn’t) met in China. However, Daisey hit on a fundamental truth about labor journalism in last night’s talk at Georgetown. He claimed he stretched the truth about his visit to a Foxconn factory in China as part of his play The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (which later became This Americans Life’s most downloaded episode) to dramatize a story of labor abuse that had largely been ignored. As a labor reporter who has often seen stories I have written about brutal working conditions ignored, I sympathized with Daisey and his broader critique of the problems of labor journalism.

from MediaFile:

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Several days after the launch of the new iPad 3, HD, or whatever it’s called, we all know about it’s blazing 4G capabilities, including its ability to be a hotspot, carrier permitting, of course. We know about its Retina display, which makes the painful, insufferable scourge of image pixelization a thing of the past. We know about Infinity Blade. We know that to pack all this in, Apple’s designers had to let out the new iPad’s aluminum waist to accommodate some unfortunate but really quite microscopic weight gain. We know the iPad’s battery life is still amazing, and its price point is altogether unchanged. We know Apple has adopted a cunning new strategy of putting the previous-generation iPad, as it did with the iPhone 4, on a sort of permanent sale, to scoop up the low end of the high-end market. (We wonder if this was Steve Jobs’s last decree or Tim Cook’s first.) We know a lot about the iPad.

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Steve Jobs smelled so foul that none of his co-workers at Atari in the seventies would work with him. Entreating him to shower was usually futile; he’d inevitably claim that his strict vegan diet had rid him of body odor, thus absolving him of the need for standard hygiene habits. Later, friends would theorize that he had been exercising what would prove a limitless capacity for sustained and gratuitous lying that came to be nicknamed the “reality distortion field.”

from Katharine Herrup:

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There are two stories about the corporate hijacking of #OccupyWallStreet on Reuters.com. One piece talks about how U.S. ice cream maker Ben & Jerry is making a laughing stock of the protestors by issuing a statement in support of the protest:

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Steve Jobs retires as the CEO of Apple with a reputation that will place him amongst the pantheon of history’s great global business leaders. Many people have written about what makes Jobs and Apple special, but I think they’re missing what truly set him apart. Jobs has succeeded by eschewing the one thing that most people view as the raison d’être for companies — profit.

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– Robert X. Cringely has been writing about technology since 1987 and blogging since 1997. His work has appeared, well, everywhere, but can mainly be read at http://www.cringely.com. The views expressed are his own. –